What, who reads good sf and
speculative fiction? There isn’t anything else worth reading but speculative
fiction, is there? When they say there are countless books to read, they don’t
mean that’s because the number is zero. We can read spaced-out books about what
things are coming to if we want to keep up with the times. What coming to and
where headed, much of it not positive in nature, such as the latest book now up
for review at the Spaced Out Library. Our book for this third of the year is
John Scalzi’s THE END OF ALL THINGS, which of course portrays a negative future
to which more and more writers are being drawn in their considerations of what
to write about.

The end of all things? What,
ALL of them? Even Surprising Stories? No, it’s not the end of Surprising
Stories, unless the computer system crashes, which writers have been
predicting. That reminds me of the principle that seems to be involved in the
maxim that no one knows what they’re doing in this life, ultimately. That would
include the “good” people, those supposed to be above war, but there is
increasing evidence in our literature that such people do not exist; Surprising
Stories would be an example of these nonexistent good people, who are doubtless
finding out that it doesn’t pay to be good either.

That’s the mood if not the
theme of the book that lurks behind John Scalzi’s unequivocal title. To
separate the novel from the world we have been used to, one of the crucial
characters is a brain in a box, his aggressors having deprived him of a body,
not a totally new idea; DONOVAN’S BRAIN and THE ALTERED EGO both go back to the
fifties, and there is much talk of a brain in the work called FRANKENSTEIN. The
brain is used to pilot an aggressive warship, but it outwits its captors by doing
its own thing, throwing aside the b.s. promises it is being given about
recovering its body as unrealistic. These aggressors have the technology
necessary to preserve and make use of a detached brain, but they lack all other
intelligence to the point of not even being very good war strategists except
for knowing enough to kill everyone they get ahold of who can’t be used. Such
adversaries exist also in the movies and on television; in Star Trek there’s
the Klingons and the Borg, both races good at technology and possessing the
warp drive necessary for interplanetary citizenship, but otherwise animals and
monsters. In Andromeda there’s the Magog, apparently named after the warfare
combo of Gog and Magog; they’re just things, in spite of the presence on the
Andromeda of one of them, the Reverend Bem. In Battlestar Galactica there’s
artificial intelligences who have surpassed man in their development of the
very technology which created them, and are destroying man, with hints that
they may have a superior morality found in the dialog and plot. SG-1 has a race
of ancients resembling those found in Lovecraft’s works who are no good at all,
to put it mildly. Man’s seen as no good at all, these ancients are worse than
that. In Doctor Who there’s just about anything, none of it pleasant in the
least, although its fans seem to get much pleasure out of the series.

So Scalzi’s work and title pretty much sums up all of these things that
have been dominating science fiction since the late sixties; the publication date
of this book is 2015. It portrays absolutely unworkable super-governments
spread across space whose political maneuverings resemble a cheap lottery or
other gambling establishment. Mass death accompanies any move made to interfere
with a society and no one is fit to come out on top; nothing proposed would
constitute a tolerable progress. His work is described as “entertaining”,
“appealing”, “commercial”, “funny” and “thoroughly believable”; his reviewers
aren’t negative, but he might be wondering what exactly they like so well about
it. Probably these reviewers have found that any other kind of review gets them
a negative response.

This isn’t problem-solving
science fiction; this is more of the genre where there are no solutions,
perhaps having NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR in their background.

In the next issue I will be
reviewing THE LONG UTOPIA by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.